The Humane Society Legislative Fund — the lobbying arm of the prominent animal welfare organization — announced Tuesday it will be endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris. The organization cited Harris’s career support of legislation addressing wildlife trafficking, horse racing, farm animal confinement and shark fin sales, among other animal cruelty issues.
By Maura Judkis
“Animal advocates have a strong opportunity in Vice President Kamala Harris,” said Sara Amundson, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund. “We are optimistic about the potential of what a Harris administration could do to advance animal protection issues.”
The endorsement likely does not come as a surprise to those who have paid any attention to the animal headlines that have been coming out of the Republican campaign. This election cycle has been marked by bizarre stories about animal cruelty and corpse desecration, as well as politically disadvantageous negging of “cat ladies.”
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In the debate last month, former president Donald Trump falsely claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio. Those baseless claims have resulted in violent threats that have interfered with public life in Springfield. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate who has endorsed Trump, has been the subject of several stories detailing his strange behavior with animals. Kennedy admitted to dumping the corpse of a bear cub in New York’s Central Park — he said it was a prank. A decades-old incident where he allegedly cut off the head of a dead whale with a chain saw and strapped it to the top of his family’s car is under investigation. And Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance’s disparaging remarks about “cat ladies,” from 2021, continue to dog him — and have become a rallying cry for female voters on the left.
None of these incidents were the basis of the Humane Society Legislative Fund’s endorsement, though. The organization noted that it evaluates candidates solely on their policy positions regarding animal welfare. (Though Amundson told The Washington Post in August that throughout her more than 3o years of work in animal welfare, she had “never seen an election cycle like this one.”)
Harris, the organization noted in its news release, defended California’s law against the sale of foie gras while attorney general. (The luxury food item is produced by force-feeding geese until their livers become enlarged and diseased.) While in the Senate, she co-sponsored bills to ban public contact with exotic cats, reduce abuse in the horse racing industry, and ban the sale of shark fins (commercial fishers often remove the shark’s fin while it is still alive and dump it back in the water, leaving it unable to swim).
While president, Trump’s record on animal protection was mixed. In 2019, he signed into law a sweeping ban on animal cruelty that outlawed purposeful crushing, burning, drowning, suffocation, impalement or other violence causing “serious bodily injury” to animals. But his administration also stripped protections for endangered species, including gray wolves, which environmentalists fear will be hunted to extinction. Wolf hunting was halted two years ago after a lawsuit from wildlife advocates, but in September, the Biden administration asked an appeals court to lift the ban, an action the Humane Society of the United States has opposed.
Harris recently spoke out about Trump’s falsehood about the dog and cat rumors, saying the former president was “spewing lies that are grounded in tropes that are age-old.” Meanwhile, her vice-presidential pick, Gov. Tim Walz, did an interview on WeRateDogs, a popular dog social media account.
“I think our politics can sometimes bring out the worst” in people, he said in the interview, which also featured his mixed-breed dog, Scout, but dogs “bring out the best in us.”
